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Until Apple Brings Siri To The Mac, We’ll Have To Live With Jeannie (a free, irritating assistant)

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Remember when Apple launched the iPhone? We thought the future was a touch interface. Even with the iPad, we sense an easy, simple way to navigate apps just using intuition and a finger touch.

Touch is so passé. Apple is putting a lot of time, effort, and money in Siri, a voice activated, intelligent-like personal assistant with personality. The computer interface of the future is voice.

Say goodbye to keyboard, trackpad, mouse, and welcome Siri. And a bunch of Siri wannabe apps like Voice Actions’s Jeannie for the Mac.

Jeannie is a personal assistant that you control with your voice (heritage is traced back to apps on iPhone and Android smart phones) using speech commands.

Similar to Siri, Jeannie responds to a bunch of basic phrases.

Call James at home

Launch TextMate

Mail Maria that I love her

Begin dictation

News about Barack Obama

Set alarm clock

Wake me up on Monday at 8 am

What is the capital of brazil?

Launch a web browser

Open contact Peter

Search Amazon

Translate ‘I love you’ into Spanish

Email john … I liked your song

Remind me to pick up Joe in 30 minutes

Spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Whats the horoscope for Leo?

You get the idea, right?

Voice Actions does basic actions on your Mac based upon voice interaction– commands and responses.

There’s even built-in dictation.

How does Jeannie stack up against the competition? I use Dragon Express for Mac dictation, and Jeannie isn’t that good, but not bad (especially considering the price differential).

Some of Jeannie’s responses are a little creep, though, and not as refined as Siri on the iPhone– more like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey than Siri (but with a serious attitude problem).

Voice interaction is the future and Apple is blazing the trail in that direction. Voice Actions’ Jeannie is one of what will probably be many imitators. It’s not bad for free, and kinda fun, but not yet as useful as we want a personal assistant to become.

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